The military gives Americans a lot of incentives to join with a lot of different things: education minus the insane student loans, money stipends specifically for clothes and food, housing and utilities covered, and a guaranteed job.

Since I grew up an Air Force brat who had the amazing opportunity to travel the world at such a young age, I was set on also joining once I graduated high school; it felt like my only option. I did not understand how civilians were 'able to handle everything like mortgages and many other things of that nature.' Voluntarily joining the military may be a decision that mainly impacts that person specifically, but if they adopt or have a child, they are going to have a completely different experience than their parent who grew up as a civilian.

I may now have the skills to be able to adapt quickly to new surroundings due to moving eight times in my 20 years of life, but I also wish I had friends that I've known since kindergarten. I got used to moving away from my problems instead of learning how to resolve them. I only really felt safe when I knew there was a tall barbed wire fence surrounding where I lived. I was sheltered from what was going on in the country and how not everyone lived as comfortably as I had been. It had not even occurred to me that people had to pay for trash to be picked up every week until I was a freshman in high school when I first 'entered civilian life' in high school.

Many of the friends that I have been able to keep in contact with can agree with me when I say that I wish I was not so misled with my understanding of what life outside of the military was and what that 'meant.' I am not discouraging any members in the service from having kids and living in the moment with them, I just don't want their kids to go through this ridiculous process of realizing how different life is outside of the military and thinking the rest of the country has it as these benefits. It creates a false image of what the rest of this country is going through, and it makes it extremely hard to be integrated into life outside of the military; it's like driving to an apple orchard or pick apples, but when you get there, all of the trees are orange trees. Please do not neglect to acknowledge the differences between civilian and military life to your kids so they are not overwhelmed and have to learn everything 'from scratch' when they first face civilian life.